Teen girl gathers 25,000 anti-Photoshop signatures

Can a 14-year-old girl change the magazine industry? With the backing of 25,000 people, one teen just might.

Julia Bluhm stood outside Seventeen headquarters in New York City this week, clutching nearly 25,000 signatures asking the magazine to include a Photoshop-free spread in each month’s issue. The 8th grader from Waterville, Maine launched the movement because, as she pointed out, “We know that Photoshop can be very harmful to girls because they think they have to look like these images. But it’s not even real, it’s Photoshop. So it’s kind of impossible to look like that in real life.”

The petition spread over social media with the help of press release created by a San Francisco-based PR firm that drew the attention of blogs and traditional media.

Bluhm expressed excitement about the effort’s success thus far, saying, “I now know that there are a lot of girls who feel the same way as I do about this.”

Comments are off for this post.

Anonymous

5 years ago

I think this is a great step towards clearing the air. The amount of time and effort girls will invest in trying to make themselves look like models, especially when the models themselves are not like that, is criminal.